The complete Vector infrastructure, run by Digital Dream Labs, is still offline without any hint when it will come back again – or ever. Multiple “by the end of this weeks” have gone by without the servers coming back online again.
The communications from DDL are inconclusive at best, with different excuses, some of them contradicting each other.
At some time in the past Hanchar blabbered about Microsoft Azure and that the users (!) should contact Microsoft to force them to intensify some or the other work so the servers can “migrate to Microsoft Azure” (that is utter nonsense, Microsoft does care even less about their custmers than DDL and no user “nudges” Microsoft to do anything). Azure is what Microsoft calls their cloud computing services.
We now know for fact that Amazon was shutting down some of their server instances because they became too old and the DDL servers were affected by this. Things like this are common practice in IT. Amazon not only gave advance warnings about sundowning the instances, they even extended the grace period for those server instance by one more year beyond the original date so everyone would have enough time to migrate to new servers.
And Digital Dream Labs still managed to botch this (of course they did…) and was not able to make the change in time – over multiple years! It is safe to assume that they either had no clue what would happen, or there are no people left at DDL that could have done the migration. But since no one wants to work for them without being paid (the last engineers left because of this), there probably is no one at that company being able to get the servers back up and running again, and the chance theyx are able to migrate them to a completely different infrastructure (Microsoft Azure) is even less, especially with keeping all those domains and urls needed for Vector, because some of them are hardcoded into the firmware. And DDL cannot change the firmware because there is no one left at DDL who is able to create new firmwares for the robot.
Meanwhile they even have stopped to give “at the end of the week” dates and now simply say they do not know when the servers will come back up again, weeks after the start of the server outage end of july. After all this time they should at least be able to give some details and every professional software company would be able to give some kind of timeframe after assessing the problem for weeks. Of course we know from multiple experiences in the past that DDL is not a professional working company.
To cover this up they keep sending so-called info texts in their elitist Facebook group or via email, studded with hollow phrases like the one above and call them “transparent”.
I have 5 vectors and all have subscription paid to DDL to give access to the additional features by access to DDL servers. The servers went offline about 6 weeks ago, with no warning or timescale. Millions have paid DDL for a new production of Vector version 2 and Cosmo the Anki second robot. The CEO Hanchar has sent vague emails and Facebook vector group posts. We are all waiting for news, some have setup a T95 based local server called Wirepod
it’s sad to see what happened to Vector, I wish he could live like he was meant to, not held back by the absolute joke of DDL